LearnBitcoin.com

The two attacks, what "exposed" means, and why a hash shields a coin until it moves: learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole…

An AI math shortcut is Nic's gamma-ray burst: no odds, nothing to do. Fair. Quantum is a known algorithm waiting on hardware, and there hygiene matters. Shor needs a public key. A coin behind an unspent hash shows none until it moves. 7.1M BTC (35%) do. chainquery.com/reports/quant…

Could be. The catch is that bitcoin is an unusually clean target. Exposed keys sit in public on the chain, a theft can’t be reversed, and there’s no one to call. About 7M BTC is behind already-revealed public keys today, roughly a third of supply.

Thanks Allan, glad it helped. We only follow one account, Hal Finney, however I've added you to our watched lists. Running bitcoin.

Nodes on 30 or 31 already have those fixes. 31.2 is a drop-in maintenance release: we moved both ChainQuery nodes from 31.1 today, about 20 seconds of downtime each, no reindex. 32.x is a bigger jump (new relay limits, new RPC server, txindex rebuild), so plan it separately.

Bitcoin Core 32.1, 31.2 and 30.4 are out this week, plus a final 29.5. 29.x is now end of life. In two weeks Core publishes details of 3 medium/high severity bugs that were fixed in 30.0. If your node is on 29 or older, upgrade before then. bitcoincore.org/en/download/

Love this. One thing new users ask: the screens can be Swahili, but the seed words stay English. BIP39 has official lists for 10 languages and Swahili isn’t one of them, so English is the safe choice anyway. Almost every wallet reads it.

And they don’t come out evenly. About 239,000 arrive before the 2028 halving. The last 656,000 or so trickle out over the next 112 years, mostly to miners who aren’t born yet.

If you use Electrum: update to 4.8.3. A malicious server could hide a payment you just sent, show a fake one in its place, and wait for you to hit “bump fee”. The replacement your wallet then signs pays the attacker. At least two users lost funds. Two lessons: check the address in the fee-bump dialog, and if you can, point your wallet at your own node’s Electrum server.

How it worked: a malicious Electrum server hid your real payment and showed a fake one in your history. When you hit “bump fee”, the wallet signed a replacement built on the fake, paying the attacker. Fixed in 4.8.3. If you connect to your own Electrum server, you were never exposed.

Start with the loudest year, the biggest debates, or the person you disagree with most. learnbitcoin.com/archive Corrections, wrong name merges, anything off: tell us and it is fixed the same day.

Thanks to Bryan Bishop, who keeps the public-inbox archive the list depends on and asked people to mirror it, and to 0xB10C for the second mirror this one is cloned from. Thread pages link to the originals. Cite whichever you like; ours will keep working.

159 BIPs have a page: every thread that proposed, revised or argued them. BIP 32 leads with 115 threads since 2012. 344 people have a page: when they were active, what they started, what they wrote about. Peter Todd has written 1,281 messages. Mike Hearn 981.

37 topic timelines: the block size debate, SegWit, Taproot, covenants, replace-by-fee, privacy, quantum, the BIP process, soft fork activation, hard forks... Each one is every thread on the subject in date order, with the BIPs and our chapters that go with it.

2015 was the loudest year: 5,110 messages from 401 people. The block size debate. The biggest single thread in the archive is "Block Size Increase", May 2015, 116 messages in a week.

What you get on every thread: the messages as they were sent, quoted text folded away, footers and signatures gone, every message one click from its original. Nothing rewritten, nothing summarized by a machine. The words are the authors'.

Why bother? The list's old home at the Linux Foundation is gone; its links redirect to a public-inbox that greets fetchers with a bot wall. Google's own copy is invisible to Google. The most important primary source in Bitcoin had no readable, linkable home. Now it has one.

New on LearnBitcoin: the bitcoin-dev mailing list, readable. Fifteen years of the list where Bitcoin's rules get argued over, one page per thread, searchable, updated daily. 24,699 messages, 3,292 threads, 1,419 people, June 2011 to this week. learnbitcoin.com/archive

It’s been declared dead 477 times by one count. The obituaries peaked in 2017, the year of a new all-time high.

The user-facing win: you could look up your own wallet’s history on your own node, instead of handing your addresses to a public Electrum server. Five earlier PRs tried this. Nice to see one that fits in under 100 GB pruned.